Quotes about Churches

The churches must learn humility as well as teach it.

I never weary of great churches. It is my favourite kind of mountain scenery. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.

Too many churches have become entertainment halls where star speakers strut and swagger for their fans. For too many houses of worship, the platform has become a performance stage for musicians—and I mean that in the most ignoble sense. Even when they shout and sing the name of Jesus Christ, somehow the focus of attention is upon them and public praise stays with them.

Mere heathen morality, and not Jesus Christ, is preached in most of our churches.

We merely want to live in peace with all the world, to trade with them, to commune with them, to learn from their culture as they may learn from ours, so that the products of our toil may be used for our schools and our roads and our churches and not for guns and planes and tanks and ships of war.

A close look at many churches will reveal that a central problem is the lack of biblical maturity among the men.

Legalism is alive and well in many of our churches.

A lot of churches have not moved with the times.

The churches failed to realize that the working-class movement was the movement of the humiliated and oppressed supplicating for justice. They did not choose to work with and for them to create the kingdom of God on earth. By siding with the oppressors, they deprived the working-class movement of God. And now they reproach it for being godless. The Pharisees!

There howl your pagans; where you ever find them, next door to you; under the long-flung shadow, and the snug patronizing lee of churches. For by some curious fatality, as it is often noted of your metropolitan freebooters that they ever encamp around the halls of justice, so sinners, gentlemen, most abound in holiest vicinities.

Most people would not want to live where there are no churches but many people live as though there were no churches.

The result has been that although few conservative Presbyterian churches actually worship in the Puritan way, the Puritan theology of worship remains the standard orthodoxy among them. This discrepancy sometimes leads to guilty consciences.